Thank Goodness You’re Here! review – the most Northern video game ever

A video game set in Yorkshire is a real rarity but there’s no doubting the authenticity of Thank Goodness You’re Here!

The games industry isn’t short of problems at the moment but one thing that’s always frustrated us is how rare it is for any European developer to make its country of origin obvious through the content of its games. Few casual gamers would ever imagine that Ubisoft is French, while this month’s SCHiM may be the first game ever to be set solely in the Netherlands. Sometimes it seems like every second video game is developed in Sweden and yet the number of games set there is minuscule.

From just playing it, no one would guess that Grand Theft Auto 5, the most successful video game of all time, was made in Scotland, especially as, for some reason, Rockstar North is the only Rockstar studio not named after its location. Despite the talent on hand, the UK’s visible influence on the games industry is distressingly small, to the point where things like Fallout London have been left to fans to create.

The UK even seems underrepresented in term of indie games, but the country of origin for Thank Goodness You’re Here! is not only very obvious, it’s one of the central appeals. After all, it’s not many games who, before you start, ask the question ‘A’ tha from Tarn?’ to which the affirmative is ‘Dead reyt.’

That question is used to turn the subtitles on and off, which translate all the North patter into standard King’s English. Developer Coal Supper is from Yorkshire and the game is set in the fictional town of Barnsworth, which is depicted in a wonderfully vivid animated style that is reminiscent of Viz and The Beano but is very much its own.

You play as a Smurf-sized travelling salesman with a yellow, rugby ball-shaped head, who never speaks, rarely emotes, and doesn’t appear to have a name. Most of the time he operates like an animated soft toy, but nominally he’s in Barnsworth to meet the mayor, except he keeps getting sidetracked by the town’s oddball population, all of whom exclaim ‘Thank goodness you’re here!’ before giving him an inane quest to complete.

Because this is a British-made game, these problems involve such serious issues as the local chip shop’s fryer being broken and a small boy running out of milk for his tea. Everything is far, far weirder than that suggests though, with the chip shop being a three-part epic involving, amongst other things, a sentient sausage that can stretch like Mr Tickle. Meanwhile, the milk one concludes with a journey into the conjoined psyche of a farmer and his cow – or at least we think that’s what’s happening.

The game is filled with surrealist humour, cheap smut (the scene with the man and a bag of fertiliser is amazing), silly puns and visual gags, and purposeful Northern stereotypes. Not only is it frequently laugh out loud funny but it’s also highly original. Like the art style, you can pin down a few vague influences, but the comedy is very much its own.

A sequence featuring talking daisies is an early highlight, but that scene is one of the few times that your actions have any effect on the joke, and even then you’re only pushing left and right across the screen. The only abilities your character possess are jump and slap, with the latter used to interact with people and things but usually it does nothing substantial. The game is nominally a platformer but only very infrequently and the action is so simplistic it barely registers at all.

There are things that almost count as puzzles but they’re not really, with pleas to find seven lost seagulls, or squash all the snails in an allotment, over within seconds, because they’re all crowded together in the same location, with no attempt to hide them.

We’ve struggled to settle on a description for what kind of game this is and the closest we can get, in terms of traditional genre labels, is a walking sim. That’s in the sense that there’s very little interactivity and in most cases the best laughs are had in cut scenes, eavesdropping on people, or moving past an open window on the way to somewhere else. Although there’s also a pseudo-Metroidvania element in that you keep coming back to the same locations, for different reasons, and there’s a bit too much backtracking.

That’s not an issue in itself but the more tangible problem is that the game is barely three hours long and has no obvious replayability. It’s cheap but it’s certainly not free, although you could make the argument that it’s about the same price as a cinema ticket – if you want to think of it as a choice between this and Deadpool & Wolverine.

It may be brief, and utterly bewildering no matter where in the world you hail from, but this is hugely entertaining from beginning to end. From the script to the animation, what’s most impressive is just how confident and polished everything else, despite this only being the second game the developer has ever made.

It’s tempting to wish Thank Goodness You’re Here! had more traditional gameplay elements but the developer clearly has a very specific vision and they’ve executed on it perfectly. It may be a long time till there’s another video game set in Yorkshire, but you won’t forget this one in a hurry.

Formats: Nintendo Switch (reviewed), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC
Price: £15.99
Publisher: Panic
Developer: Coal Supper
Release Date: 1st August 2024
Age Rating: 16

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